John Dewey's My Pedagogic Creed

MyPed

agogic Creec

by John Dewey

From Professor Thibeault: This short piece is a gem! Dewey,
then living and teaching in Chicago, lays out a creed that
foreshadows many of his mature educational ideas.

This edition was used to create an audio version, which was
recorded and edited by students in fall 2008, and posted to
the Internet Archive' for all to enjoy. Numbers were added to
each paragraph to facilitate discussion.

Article One. What Education Is

1. I believe that all education proceeds by the participa-
tion of the individual in the social consciousness of
the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at
birth, and is continually shaping the individual's pow-
ers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits,
training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emo-
tions. Through this unconscious education the indi-
vidual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and
moral resources which humanity has succeeded in get-
ting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded
capital of civilization. The most formal and technical
education in the world cannot safely depart from this
general process. It can only organize it; or differentiate
it in some particular direction.

2. I believe that the only true education comes through
the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands
of the social situations in which he finds himself
Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a
member of a unity, to emerge from his original nar-
rowness of action and feeling and to conceive of him-
self from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to
which he belongs. Through the responses which others
make to his own activities he comes to know what
these mean in social terms. The value which they have
is reflected back into them. For instance, through the
response which is made to the child's instinctive bab-
blings the child comes to know what those babblings

mean; they are transformed into articulate language
and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated
wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed
up in language.

3. I believe that this educational process has two sides
- one psychological and one sociological; and that
neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected
without evil results following. Of these two sides, the
psychological is the basis. The child's own instincts and
powers furnish the material and give the starting point
for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator
connect with some activity which the child is carrying
on of his own initiative independent of the educa-
tor, education becomes reduced to a pressure from
without. It may, indeed, give certain external results
but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight
into the psychological structure and activities of the
individual, the educative process will, therefore, be
haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with
the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it
will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the
child nature.

4. I believe that knowledge of social conditions, of the
present state of civilization, is necessary in order
properly to interpret the child's powers. The child has
his own instincts and tendencies, but we do not know
what these mean until we can translate them into their
social equivalents. We must be able to carry them back
into a social past and see them as the inheritance of
previous race activities. We must also be able to project
them into the future to see what their outcome and
end will be. In the illustration just used, it is the ability
to see in the child's babblings the promise and potency
of a fixture social intercourse and conversation which
enables one to deal in the proper way with that in-
stinct.

5. I believe that the psychological and social sides are
organically related and that education cannot be re-
garded as a compromise between the two, or a super-
imposition of one upon the other. We are told that the

1. © 2009 Digital edition released under a Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration. Digital layout prepared
by Matthew D. Thibeault. Originally published in School Journal vol. 54 (January 1 897), pp. 77-80. For the scholarly edi-
tion, see volume 5 oixht Early Works, pp 84-95. Digital text source: http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm

2. http://www.archive.org

1

psychological definition of education is barren and
formal - that it gives us only the idea of a development
of all the mental powers without giving us any idea of
the use to which these powers are put. On the other
hand, it is urged that the social definition of educa-
tion, as getting adjusted to civilization, makes of it a
forced and external process, and results in subordinat-
ing the freedom of the individual to a preconceived
social and political status.

6. I believe each of these objections is true when urged
against one side isolated from the other. In order to
Icnow what a power really is we must loiow what its
end, use, or fianction is; and this we cannot Icnow save
as we conceive of the individual as active in social
relationships. But, on the other hand, the only possible
adjustment which we can give to the child under exist-
ing conditions, is that which arises through putting
him in complete possession of all his powers. With the
advent of democracy and modern industrial condi-
tions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what
civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is
impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of
conditions. To prepare him for the future life means
to give him command of himself; it means so to train
him that he will have the full and ready use of all his
capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools
ready to command, that his judgment may be capable
of grasping the conditions under which it has to work,
and the executive forces be trained to act economi-
cally and efficiently. It is impossible to reach this sort
of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the
individual's own powers, tastes, and interests - say, that
is, as education is continually converted into psycho-
logical terms. In sum, I believe that the individual who
is to be educated is a social individual and that society
is an organic union of individuals. If we eliminate the
social factor from the child we are lefi: only with an
abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from
society, we are lefi: only with an inert and lifeless mass.
Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological
insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits.
It must be controlled at every point by reference to
these same considerations. These powers, interests, and
habits must be continually interpreted - we must know
what they mean. They must be translated into terms
of their social equivalents - into terms of what they are
capable of in the way of social service.

Article Two. What the School Is

7. I believe that the school is primarily a social institu-
tion. Education being a social process, the school is
simply that form of community life in which all those
agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in
bringing the child to share in the inherited resources
of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.

8. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living
and not a preparation for fiature living.

9. I believe that the school must represent present life
- life as real and vital to the child as that which he
carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the
play-ground.

10. I believe that education which does not occur through
forms of life, forms that are worth living for their own
sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality
and tends to cramp and to deaden.

1 1. I believe that the school, as an institution, should sim-
plify existing social life; should reduce it, as it were, to
an embryonic form. Existing life is so complex that the
child cannot be brought into contact with it without
either confusion or distraction; he is either over-
whelmed by multiplicity of activities which are going
on, so that he loses his own power of orderly reaction,
or he is so stimulated by these various activities that his
powers are prematurely called into play and he be-
comes either unduly specialized or else disintegrated.

12. I believe that, as such simplified social life, the school
life should grow gradually out of the home life; that it
should take up and continue the activities with which
the child is already familiar in the home.

13. I believe that it should exhibit these activities to the
child, and reproduce them in such ways that the child
will gradually learn the meaning of them, and be ca-
pable of playing his own part in relation to them.

14. I believe that this is a psychological necessity, because
it is the only way of securing continuity in the child's
growth, the only way of giving a background of past
experience to the new ideas given in school.

15. I believe it is also a social necessity because the home
is the form of social life in which the child has been
nurtured and in connection with which he has had
his moral training. It is the business of the school to

deepen and extend his sense of the vakies bound up in
his home hfe.

16. I beUeve that much of present education fails because
it neglects this fiindamental principle of the school as
a form of community life. It conceives the school as a
place where certain information is to be given, where
certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain
habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived
as lying largely in the remote future; the child must

do these things for the sake of something else he is to
do; they are mere preparation. As a result they do not
become a part of the life experience of the child and so
are not truly educative.

17. I believe that moral education centres about this
conception of the school as a mode of social life, that
the best and deepest moral training is precisely that
which one gets through having to enter into proper
relations with others in a unity of work and thought.
The present educational systems, so far as they destroy
or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible
to get any genuine, regular moral training.

18. I believe that the child should be stimulated and con-
trolled in his work through the life of the community.

19. I believe that under existing conditions far too much
of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher,
because of neglect of the idea of the school as a form of
social life.

20. I believe that the teacher's place and work in the
school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The
teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas
or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as
a member of the community to select the influences
which shall affect the child and to assist him in prop-
erly responding to these influences.

21. I believe that the discipline of the school should
proceed from the life of the school as a whole and not
direcdy from the teacher.

22. I believe that the teacher's business is simply to deter-
mine on the basis of larger experience and riper wis-
dom, how the discipline of life shall come to the child.

23. I believe that all questions of the grading of the child
and his promotion should be determined by reference
to the same standard. Examinations are of use only

so far as they test the child's fitness for social life and
reveal the place in which he can be of most service and
where he can receive the most help.

Article Three. The Subject-Matter of Education

24. I believe that the social life of the child is the basis
of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or
growth. The social life gives the unconscious unity and
the background of all his efforts and of all his attain-
ments.

25. I believe that the subject-matter of the school curricu-
lum should mark a gradual differentiation out of the
primitive unconscious unity of social life.

26. I believe that we violate the child's nature and render
difficult the best ethical results, by introducing the
child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of
reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this
social life.

27. I believe, therefore, that the true centre of correlation
of the school subjects is not science, nor literature,
nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social
activities.

28. I believe that education cannot be unified in the study
of science, or so-called nature study, because apart
from human activity, nature itself is not a unity; nature
in itself is a number of diverse objects in space and
time, and to attempt to make it the centre of work by
itself, is to introduce a principle of radiation rather
than one of concentration.

29. I believe that literature is the reflex expression and
interpretation of social experience; that hence it must
follow upon and not precede such experience. It,
therefore, cannot be made the basis, although it may
be made the summary of unification.

30. I believe once more that history is of educative value
in so far as it presents phases of social life and growth.
It must be controlled by reference to social life. When
taken simply as history it is thrown into the distant
past and becomes dead and inert. Taken as the record
of man's social life and progress it becomes full of
meaning. I believe, however, that it cannot be so taken
excepting as the child is also introduced directly into
social life.

31.1 believe accordingly that the primary basis of educa-
tion is in the child's powers at work along the same
general constructive lines as those which have brought
civilization into being.

32. I believe that the only way to make the child conscious
of his social heritage is to enable him to perform those
fundamental types of activity which makes civilization
what it is.

33. I believe, therefore, in the so-called expressive or con-
structive activities as the centre of correlation.

34. I believe that this gives the standard for the place of
cooking, sewing, manual training, etc., in the school.

35. I believe that they are not special studies which are
to be introduced over and above a lot of others in the
way of relaxation or relief, or as additional accomplish-
ments. I believe rather that they represent, as types,
fundamental forms of social activity; and that it is pos-
sible and desirable that the child's introduction into
the more formal subjects of the curriculum be through
the medium of these activities.

36. I believe that the study of science is educational in so
far as it brings out the materials and processes which
make social life what it is.

37. I believe that one of the greatest difficulties in the pres-
ent teaching of science is that the material is presented
in purely objective form, or is treated as a new peculiar
kind of experience which the child can add to that
which he has already had. In reality, science is of value
because it gives the ability to interpret and control the
experience already had. It should be introduced, not

as so much new subject- matter, but as showing the
factors already involved in previous experience and as
furnishing tools by which that experience can be more
easily and effectively regulated.

38. I believe that at present we lose much of the value of
literature and language studies because of our elimina-
tion of the social element. Language is almost always
treated in the books of pedagogy simply as the expres-
sion of thought. It is true that language is a logical in-
strument, but it is fundamentally and primarily a social
instrument. Language is the device for communica-
tion; it is the tool through which one individual comes
to share the ideas and feelings of others. When treated
simply as a way of getting individual information, or as

a means of showing off what one has learned, it loses
its social motive and end.

39. I believe that there is, therefore, no succession of
studies in the ideal school curriculum. If education
is life, all life has, from the outset, a scientific aspect;
an aspect of art and culture and an aspect of commu-
nication. It cannot, therefore, be true that the proper
studies for one grade are mere reading and writing,
and that at a later grade, reading, or literature, or sci-
ence, may be introduced. The progress is not in the
succession of studies but in the development of new
attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience.

40. I believe finally, that education must be conceived as
a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the
process and the goal of education are one and the same
thing.

41.1 believe that to set up any end outside of education,
as furnishing its goal and standard, is to deprive the
educational process of much of its meaning and tends
to make us rely upon false and external stimuli in deal-
ing with the child.

Article Four. The Nature of Method

42. I believe that the question of method is ultimately
reducible to the question of the order of development
of the child's powers and interests. The law for present-
ing and treating material is the law implicit within
the child's own nature. Because this is so I believe the
following statements are of supreme importance as de-
termining the spirit in which education is carried on:

I:'

43. I believe that the active side precedes the passive
in the development of the child nature; that ex-
pression comes before conscious impression; that
the muscular development precedes the sensory;
that movements come before conscious sensa-
tions; I believe that consciousness is essentially
motor or impulsive; that conscious states tend to
project themselves in action.

44. I believe that the neglect of this principle is the
cause of a large part of the waste of time and
strength in school work. The child is thrown into

1 The original essay uses Arabic numbers for these

four sections; we've adopted Roman Numerals to avoid
confi.xsion with the paragraph numbering.

II:

III:

a passive, receptive or absorbing attitude. The
conditions are such that he is not permitted to
follow the law of his nature; the result is friction
and waste.

45. I believe that ideas (intellectual and rational
processes) also result from action and devolve
for the sake of the better control of action. What
we term reason is primarily the law of orderly or
effective action. To attempt to develop the rea-
soning powers, the powers of judgment, without
reference to the selection and arrangement of
means in action, is the fundamental fallacy in
our present methods of dealing with this matter.
As a result we present the child with arbitrary
symbols. Symbols are a necessity in mental
development, but they have their place as tools
for economizing effort; presented by themselves
they are a mass of meaningless and arbitrary
ideas imposed from without.

46. I believe that the image is the great instrument of
instruction. What a child gets out of any subject
presented to him is simply the images which he
himself forms with regard to it.

47. I believe that if nine-tenths of the energy at
present directed towards making the child learn
certain things, were spent in seeing to it that the
child was forming proper images, the work of
instruction would be indefinitely facilitated.

48. I believe that much of the time and attention
now given to the preparation and presentation of
lessons might be more wisely and profitably ex-
pended in training the child's power of imagery
and in seeing to it that he was continually form-
ing definite, vivid, and growing images of the
various subjects with which he comes in contact
in his experience.

49. I believe that interests are the signs and symp-
toms of growing power. I believe that they
represent dawning capacities. Accordingly the
constant and careful observation of interests is of
the utmost importance for the educator.

IV:

50. I believe that these interests are to be observed
as showing the state of development which the
child has reached.

51.1 believe that the prophesy the stage upon which
he is about to enter.

52. I believe that only through the continual and
sympathetic observation of childhood's interests
can the adult enter into the child's life and see
what it is ready for, and upon what material it
could work most readily and fruitfi.illy.

53. I believe that these interests are neither to be
humored nor repressed. To repress interest is
to substitute the adult for the child, and so to
weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, to
suppress initiative, and to deaden interest. To
humor the interests is to substitute the transient
for the permanent. The interest is always the
sign of some power below; the important thing
is to discover this power. To humor the interest
is to fail to penetrate below the surface and its
sure result is to substitute caprice and whim for
genuine interest.

54. I believe that the emotions are the reflex of ac-
tions.

55. I believe that to endeavor to stimulate or arouse
the emotions apart from their corresponding ac-
tivities, is to introduce an unhealthy and morbid
state of mind.

56. I believe that if we can only secure right habits of
action and thought, with reference to the good,
the true, and the beautiful, the emotions will for
the most part take care of themselves.

57. I believe that next to deadness and dullness, for-
malism and routine, our education is threatened
with no greater evil than sentimentalism.

58. I believe that this sentimentalism is the neces-
sary result of the attempt to divorce feeling from
action.

Article Five. The School and Social Progress

59. I believe that education is the fundamental method of
social progress and reform.

60. I believe that all reforms which rest simply upon the
enactment of law, or the threatening of certain pen-
alties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward ar-
rangements, are transitory and futile.

61.1 believe that education is a regulation of the process
of coming to share in the social consciousness; and
that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis
of this social consciousness is the only sure method of
social reconstruction.

62. I believe that this conception has due regard for both
the individualistic and socialistic ideals. It is duly indi-
vidual because it recognizes the formation of a certain
character as the only genuine basis of right living. It is
socialistic because it recognizes that this right charac-
ter is not to be formed by merely individual precept,
example, or exhortation, but rather by the influence of
a certain form of institutional or community life upon
the individual, and that the social organism through
the school, as its organ, may determine ethical results.

63. I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconcili-
ation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.

64. I believe that the community's duty to education
is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and
punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society
can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphaz-
ard and chance way. But through education society
can formulate its own purposes, can organize its

own means and resources, and thus shape itself with
definiteness and economy in the direction in which it
wishes to move.

65. I believe that when society once recognizes the pos-
sibilities in this direction, and the obligations which
these possibilities impose, it is impossible to conceive
of the resources of time, attention, and money which
will be put at the disposal of the educator.

GG. I believe it is the business of every one interested in
education to insist upon the school as the primary and
most effective instrument of social progress and re-
form in order that society may be awakened to realize
what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessi-
ty of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment
properly to perform his task.

Gl . I believe that education thus conceived marks the
most perfect and intimate union of science and art
conceivable in human experience.

68. I believe that the art of thus giving shape to human
powers and adapting them to social service, is the
supreme art; one calling into its service the best of art-
ists; that no insight, sympathy, tact, executive power is
too great for such service.

69. I believe that with the growth of psychological science,
giving added insight into individual structure and laws
of growth; and with growth of social science, adding
to our knowledge of the right organization of indi-
viduals, all scientific resources can be utilized for the
purposes of education.

70. I believe that when science and art thus join hands the
most commanding motive for human action will be
reached; the most genuine springs of human conduct
aroused and the best service that human nature is
capable of guaranteed.

71.1 believe, finally, that the teacher is engaged, not sim-
ply in the training of individuals, but in the formation
of the proper social life.

72. I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity
of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for
the maintenance of proper social order and the secur-
ing of the right social growth.

73. I believe that in this way the teacher always is the
prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true
kingdom of God.